Doomed hackers and people-artists

Once upon a time, Neal Stephenson wrote:

During the late Eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, the OS of cool people—artists and creative-minded hackers—and BeOS seems to have the potential to attract the same crowd now. Be mailing lists are crowded with hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre, sending flames to each other in fractured techno-English.